#23 Empowering Teams to be Innovative
Ryan Sousa leads data innovation for Research, Hospital, and Foundation at Seattle Children’s. He is a senior leader, entrepreneur, and practitioner and brings more than 25 years of leadership experience in some of the biggest companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, Expedia, and Nokia as well as several successful startups.
Next to all the companies that Ryan has seen, he clearly noticed one key factor that drives success and innovation in companies which is empowering people! Many companies focus too much on deadlines, pressure from investors, and other things, and lose track of the main thing which is people.
To be product and not project-driven, it's crucial to share a problem instead of solutions.
In this episode, Ryan talked about the key points a leader needs to understand to empower teams instead of micromanaging them to be successful.
Ryan's book recommendations:
Meeting minutes
Table of content
0:28 - Intro Ryan Sousa
5:20 - Paradigm shift: User centricity
7:38 - Evolvement of the health care industry
9:20 - Processes vs. company maturity
17:15 - Restructuring organizations with the right mindset
22:35 - Organizational structure to empower (product) people
28:30 - Establishing open & direct communication as a Leader
30:00 - Enabling people to be innovative
42:50 - Planning frameworks on steroids
47:55 - The value of Hackathons
49:00 - 3 things that Ryan would have done differently 10 years ago
When did you see companies transition to a user-centric approach versus a pure tech technology-driven approach?
Ryan: The beauty of technology is really coming up with something that you want to try out on a consumer to see whether or not it's of interest. When you have it like Amazon, it's really easy to build a new website or a new concept, do your certainly spend time searching around, but if you've got this idea, it's not just about talking and asking people what they want, because a lot of times what people say they need, isn't really what they want! Or even what they need, and Steve Jobs is famous for like the iPad was one of those things that, of course, like why would we do an iPad? They searched all around. Nobody wanted it or better yet the iPhone. Matter of fact, at the time they had done their research and basically, the feedback from the research was people want a separate camera and people want to separate phones.
And Jobs was like: “Let's move forward.” But that was high risk! Because you're making these massive investments in something like an iPhone. And if it works out, life is good, and if it doesn't work out life, isn't so good.
But in the business that we're in, it's not like that. I absolutely love the software. It's so malleable. You don't have to make big investments to really try things out. And so now success isn't about trying to win on one idea. But to really focus on maybe a dozen things, and in making small investments on these dozens of things and then taking that feedback and really finding out what consumers care about, and then to start to focus on those few things.
I think that's the big shift. It's not about investing everything in one big idea, but really breaking it down into a whole bunch of little things.
How has that shifted in the healthcare sector?
Answer: When you look at healthcare, you don't have to start with those things that are high risk. You're trying to predict things like cancer, kidney failure, a cardiac event, or some interventions. If you do predict it on things that you should do to avoid it, you don't start there. Let's say, that's really highly sophisticated things. But there's a lot of things we can do around patient flow to improve the quality of patient flow.
Like a big thing in hospitals is census and trying to predict census, which is really, how many kiddos are in beds in the hospital. And that becomes really important because there's a lot of planning you can do if you can predict 36 hours in advance. And so that's what we do.
We focus on those things where we can leverage analytics to do these kinds of predictions in areas that are low risk to patients and families, but have high potential in terms of improving flow and experience within the hospital, or making sure that we're getting paid for those services that we provide.
You focus on those areas that they're a little more approachable and low risk. And then over time, you build into some of the other areas, but I think that's true of all industries. You focus on those things that are quick wins. And then over time, you develop your proficiency, not just from a technology perspective, but also from an organizational maturity perspective, because that’s what we always run into, right?
You can only go as fast with technologies as an organization's maturity to actually use it. And that's always the balance that we have to find is the, how do you balance those two things.
Is there a dependency between the company's maturity and the evolution of processes and the product necessarily?
Answer: Absolutely, this is why, working in a startup is very different than working in an established company because you go into a startup, there are no rules.
And then as you get bigger, how do you maintain that idea of no rules? How do you have an environment where the right things happen, but not because you have rules in place that control what people do. And I find that coming into a healthcare organization or even working for Starbucks, it's also had to do with a product to take off.
It's more of a mindset than an approach.
What are the steps that I as a Leader would have to take to establish this mindset?
… tune in to learn more 🎧
